Reissued comic strips serious business for publishers

Dean Mullaney, of comic book publisher IDW, is up for several of the 11 Eisner Award nominations garnered by the San Diego-based company. The Eisner Awards, the comic world's Oscars, are held each year during Comic-Con.

Dean Mullaney, of comic book publisher IDW, is up for several of the 11 Eisner Award nominations garnered by the San Diego-based company. The Eisner Awards, the comic world's Oscars, are held each year during Comic-Con.

In a modest San Diego office building, an intrepid team tinkers with devices that reverse time and obliterate space. These contraptions have already transported customers back to the American underworld of the Roaring ’20s, the pirate-infested Pacific of the 1930s and the timeless hollows of Dogpatch.

“This,” proclaimed Dean Mullaney, editor of IDW’s Library of American Comics, “is the golden age of comic strip reprints.”

Fueled by nostalgia and a boom in comics-related collectibles, old newspaper comic strips are enjoying a revival — directed, in part, from San Diego. IDW’s Library is full of iconic titles: “Dick Tracy,” “Terry and the Pirates,” “Li’l Abner,” “Little Orphan Annie,” “Blondie” and — despite near-fatal difficulties — “Archie.”

Today at Comic-Con, the Library will announce its latest project: the 76-year-old “Flash Gordon,” volume one due by Christmas 2011.

At the Con, lovingly designed hard-bound collections of classic newspaper comic strips are as easy to find as Imperial Stormtroopers. While common, these volumes cover an uncommonly broad range of genres, artistic styles and cultural attitudes. Measure the gulf between IDW’s two nominees for Best Archival Collection/Project-Strips at Friday night’s Eisner Awards, the comic book industry’s Oscars: “Bloom County,” all post-Watergate snark, and “Bringing up Father,” with its Art Deco flourishes and Great Depression anxieties.

And IDW is not alone in raiding the funny pages of the past and long-past.

Fantagraphics is sometimes credited with starting this trend in 2004, with volume one of its monumental “Peanuts” project. The newly published 14th volume takes the strip past its midpoint, to 1978. The Seattle publisher also offers lavish editions of “Popeye” and “Prince Valiant.”

But no publisher is more dedicated to archival collections than IDW. The Library runs the gamut from familiar titles to obscure works that haven’t been seen in decades: “Polly and Her Pals” debuted in 1912; detective “Rip Kirby” was on the case in the 1940s and ’50s; and fanciful “King Aroo” is another ’50s revival.

“There’s probably more great newspaper strips that deserve to be reprinted than my eyes will hold out to do,” Mullaney said. (His 56-year-old vision is fine, thank you very much.)

Old strips have some advantages over their more current rivals. Publishers don’t have to worry about where the stories are going, or if the artist and writer will meet their deadlines. And many of these titles already have a built-in fan base, readers with fond memories of these strips and the willingness to drop $20 to $60 per volume.

“Most of the older strips were damn good,” said Stan Lee, the former Marvel Comics president and chairman. “Beautifully drawn, well-written with carefully delineated characters. Look at ‘Peanuts.’ It’s being successfully reprinted in countless papers today since the death of its creator, Charles Schulz.”

“Peanuts,” though, is the exception to a troubling rule.

“The syndicate, United Media, kept really good photostats of the art,” said Eric Reynolds, associate publisher at Fantagraphics. “Other strips are a lot more difficult to find.”

Case in point: “Archie,” born in 1946 as a daily strip. But when IDW decided to include this popular title in its Library of American Comics, the only copies available were streaky microfilmed versions.

“These are useless for reproducing,” Reynolds noted.

For awhile, though, IDW had no other choice. “Archie Comics did not have copies,” Mullaney said. “And they had all just disappeared from the newspapers.”

The project was rescued a year ago when New York-based Archie Comics received a gift from the estate of an unnamed San Diegan: a complete set of the strip, clipped day by day from the Evening Tribune.

“From that, we were able to create the entire hardcover collection,” said Scott Dunbier, IDW’s special projects editor. “There were no other strips that we could find.”

Even when publishers have access to old newspapers, though, the strips aren’t always in pristine condition. Newsprint yellows with age, damaging colorful strips like “Prince Valiant.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, when “Valiant” was reprinted in a 50-volume set, hues were dull and their edges blurred. “Hal Foster’s line art was so fine and so precise that it was really hard to reproduce in those earlier editions,” Reynolds noted. “In hindsight, they are rather inferior packages. The reproduction, the paper, the packaging and design were nowhere near the caliber of what we are doing now.”

Critics agree. Writing in the Comics Comics journal, Dan Nadel confessed that he had once found “Valiant” something of a knightly snooze. But when Fantagraphics reissued its first volume last year, Nadel was captivated by the story and art. “Most of the action plays out against solid colors — yellows and blues expertly rhyming with one another to create a unified page,” he noted.

Captivating illustrations, yes, but is this art? Perhaps so. While comic books are often dismissed as disreputable, immature reading matter, these collections come with the reassuring trappings of highbrow culture. The first volume of “Peanuts” hit The New York Times best-seller list. The New Yorker reviewed the first volume of IDW’s “Terry and The Pirates” series, and while the magazine noted the dated “colonialism and chinoiserie,” it raved about “this groundbreaking adventure serial …”

As these old series are being re-examined by Hollywood — a new film version of “Flash” is in the works for 2012, while Steven Spielberg’s movie based on the venerable Belgian strip “Tintin” is set for next year — publishers are issuing more and more of these volumes.

“They are gorgeous,” said one Comic-Con attendee, Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, a movie production company.

“And movie studios realize this is one way to rebuild equity in a brand name, by bringing out these beautiful packages.”

Then Gomez was gone, off to meet with representatives of the “Buck Rogers” strip.